Posted
by
msmash
on Thursday January 11, 2018 @04:45PM
from the closer-look dept.

Tom Simonite, writing for Wired: In 2015, a black software developer embarrassed Google by tweeting that the company's Photos service had labeled photos of him with a black friend as "gorillas." Google declared itself "appalled and genuinely sorry." An engineer who became the public face of the clean-up operation said the label gorilla would no longer be applied to groups of images, and that Google was "working on longer-term fixes." More than two years later, one of those fixes is erasing gorillas, and some other primates, from the service's lexicon. The awkward workaround illustrates the difficulties Google and other tech companies face in advancing image-recognition technology, which the companies hope to use in self-driving cars, personal assistants, and other products. WIRED tested Google Photos using a collection of 40,000 images well-stocked with animals. It performed impressively at finding many creatures, including pandas and poodles. But the service reported "no results" for the search terms "gorilla," "chimp," "chimpanzee," and "monkey."

More than two years later, one of those fixes is erasing gorillas, and some other primates, from the service's lexicon. The awkward workaround illustrates the difficulties Google and other tech companies face in advancing image-recognition technology, which the companies hope to use in self-driving cars, personal assistants, and other products.

So what do their cars do now when they spot a gorilla crossing the road?

And there's nothing to be concerned about. Google hired some engineers from Intel to work on redesign of primate recognition - in fact, they hired the same old wise engineers who gave us the Meltdown vulnerability. What could possibly go wrong?

And there's nothing to be concerned about. Google hired some engineers from Intel to work on redesign of primate recognition - in fact, they hired the same old wise engineers who gave us the Meltdown vulnerability. What could possibly go wrong?

So what do their cars do now when they spot a gorilla crossing the road?

It's not about crossing the road. It's about hailing a ride from a self-driving taxi. Until google solves this problem, gorillas will be able go wherever they want by car, which will cause the other animals to get mad.

You're trying to be funny, but I think this highlights part of the problem. It's not necessarily Google's image recognition software, it's also poor photographs. A self-driving car (if it needed to distinguish between gorillas and black people) wouldn't have as much problem because it can adjust the camera's exposure to where it can see enough detail to distinguish the two. But a lot of photos of black people are taken with the wrong exposure, and the black skin tones end up crushed down into just a few discrete color values near black, or clipped to 0. The AI then ends up trying to distinguish one black humanoid-shaped blob from another.

When I shot weddings on film, I had to use special low contrast film (had a larger dynamic range). That was the only way to retain detail in both the bride's white dress and the groom's black tuxedo. And even then, if the wedding was held in sunlight a lot of the detail might still be unrecoverable. Modern cameras are getting around the problem with automatic HDR photo mode (takes two photos at different exposures to preserve detail in both the highlights and shadows, then combines them nonlinearly). But there's still a huge library of badly-exposed photos out there (from the pre-HDR days and being added to by current photographers taking simple snapshots without really caring about exposure), just waiting to trip up any image recognition AI.

White skin tends to be slightly brighter than the average background, while black skin tends to be much darker. So to properly expose a portrait of a black person, you have to either make sure their skin dominates the camera's auto-exposure algorithm, and not the background or their clothing. Or put additional light specifically on their face (e.g. fill flash) so it's not so dark relative to the background. A professional photographer knows this. The average person taking a snapshot, and the auto-exposure algorithm in their camera, does not.

A self-driving car (if it needed to distinguish between gorillas and black people) wouldn't have as much problem because it can adjust the camera's exposure to where it can see enough detail to distinguish the two....

A professional photographer knows this. The average person taking a snapshot, and the auto-exposure algorithm in their camera, does not.

There is a a fascinating contradiction here that reveals why "self driving cars" are not anywhere close to being a reality.

In order for the car to adjust the camera exposure to see enough detail to distinguish between a black person and a gorilla, it needs to somehow "know" that there is a problem with what it "thinks" it sees. Of course a professional photographer has the skill to do this, because they are considered to be intelligent. If the car is able to do this, then it, too, will be considered intelli

It's a weakness of the AI too. Humans know how other humans act. They stand upright, they sit in chairs, they eat with cutlery, they tend to look at the camera, they smile, they have patches of skin not covered by hair... Even with a bad photo, a human can tell it's not a primate from other clues.

White skin tends to be slightly brighter than the average background, while black skin tends to be much darker.

... unless you're doing digital photography of people on a painted-black stage. Then, dark skin tends to have similar brightness to the background, and white skin tends to be a blown out pile of poo (unless you under-expose by at least a couple of stops). And, of course, the background ends up at 50% grey, so you can see every scuff mark on the floor. *sigh*

Have you ever gone to the zoo and looked at the larger primates? They're fascinating because they're so much like us; I defy you to look a silverback in the eyes and not see a near-human intelligence looking back at you.

To a human, they're obviously not human... but to an algorithm checking out just the facial features? I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner.

I think you should avoid eye contact with gorillas as they may view it as a form of aggression. There was an incident at a Dutch zoo several years ago where a Gorilla escaped its exhibit and attacked a women who was constantly visiting the zoo and making eye contact and smiling at the Gorilla (why they didn't kick her out or ban her I don't know) which was making it absolutely pissed.

Regardless of how much or little they're like us, or the amount of intelligence they posses, they are ridiculously strong

>I think you should avoid eye contact with gorillas as they may view it as a form of aggression.

Absolutely. And because I'm smarter than a gorilla (I hope!) it's on me to bend to its instincts. They're already locked up in a smallish habitat with a bunch of hairless apes constantly walking through their territory, they don't need us entering an eye-contact dominance contest with them to stress them out.

My local zoo has extremely thick Plexiglas (or equivalent) on the gorilla enclosure. I've seen the b

Human communication is more (and in some ways less) nuanced than animal. Looking certain animals in the eye has an approximate human equivalent of drawing a weapon. Animals react appropriately to what THEY perceive as a direct threat, not what YOU perceive as threatening.

The problem is how the algorithm makes it determination. Most of the programs take a photo and look for shapes and features, for example facial recognition programs use the corners of eyes and mouths and a few other easily identified points on the face. The problem is almost all primates have the same points and symmetry, but they should be able to solve the problem by expanding beyond these points and looking at things like hair patterns, teeth and other features that distinguish the different primate spec

Why is this so hard to accept as not only true, but also a giant image recognition/computer vision challenge?

You go to nearly any zoo with large primates and you're bound to hear someone say "They look so human!" Well of course they do, humans are primates.

Which means that it works in reverse, too, primates look like humans. And it's not surprising that blacks look more like gorillas. I mean, there is the whole black coloration to begin with, but also the flatter nose and other facial features of gorillas which are shared with black more than Caucasians.

Of course no reasonable human would think that a black *is* a gorilla or vice versa. But computer vision? It's like version 0.01 alpha and the similarities are strong enough that it's not surprising at all that it would misidentify blacks as gorillas or vice versa.

It's like that recent H&M ad scandal with the little kid wearing a "Coolest monkey in the jungle" shirt. Kids get called monkeys all the time... when they're playing (especially climbing trees!) there's not a hell of a lot of difference between them and other young primates playing.

Because of (primarily) American racism issues, everyone assumes if you're calling a dark-skinned kid a 'monkey' you're trying to chain him and put him to work picking cotton. Same thing here - it's an understandable situation that gets people all bent out of shape because of shit that SHOULD be nothing but embarrassing history that died with our grandparents' generation.

And yet, if you said what swb said inside Google, you'd be blacklisted by managers, targeted by Googles peer-pressure diversity acceptance program, and possibly threatened with violence (according to the screenshots presented as evidence in the lawsuit).

None of this should be controversial, none of this should be interesting, and yet there's a whole political group in the US (well, more than one) who exist only to benefit from identity politics, so everything is offensive.

If you want to play that game... it should never have happened in the first place. "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is a pretty universal bit of wisdom humans routinely ignore if it interferes with their tribal instincts.

I went with 'grandparents' because as a middle-aged white guy I had racist grandparents who are no longer living. And mostly because I wasn't raised in a racist environment and the idea of one is (to me) foreign to my generation.

What do they call Monkey Bars at an inner city school?And you're spot on about the playing. Nephew used to love just clambering all over people to get onto their shoulders, or hanging upside-down off things.

Yeah - my brother's nickname for his daughter is "Baby monkey" (which he often sings as "I love baby monkeys" to the tune of "I love beach music", but I digress).

Point is its very common for kids to be referred to as monkeys. Now, given the past situation I certainly think it would be wise to pull the ad once it was brought to their attention, but realistically there's almost zero chance that any racism or offense was intended. As a matter of fact to a large degree I think it's a sign of how far we've com

Considering the equivalent intelligence of a computer, mis-identifying a gorilla and a black person based on facial features alone isn't half bad... It's exactly something you'd expect from a low intelligence entity with little experience and limited comprehension of the ramifications of the identification. Similar to a toddler, don't be surprised when computers start thinking all fat people are going to have a baby just because they have been told that there is a baby inside a big belly.

It's pattern recognition. The computers are seeing a pattern, but it's incomplete and thus wrong. It's not like the computer was programmed to be offensive...

Technically, people areapes [wikipedia.org]! But not gorillas as the software determined.

It's likely that the image recognition software decided with high certainty that the two were primates, and decided with low certainty that they were probably gorillas. With the certainty so low on the latter, the software should not have been so specific. Just "primates" or "apes" would have been factually correct.

The word also means a low-level worker. In Nelson's navy a powder monkey was a boy who would run down to the magazine to fetch ammunition. Today we have grease monkeys, code monkeys and editing monkeys.

What the rest of us are also accepting as true is that comparisons to apes have been and still are used as racial slurs.

What we also accept as true is that just becuause it's an algorithm, does not magically absolve you of responsibility. You wrote it, tested it and deployed it therefore you are responsible for what it's doing.

It's not racist to accidently create a thing. However if you create something that acts

Are you THAT obtuse? I guess you are. The GP thinks we're all still racists. Well, except for him. HE'S not a racist, just you.

How unable are you to parse a little bit of rhetorical holding-up-the-mirror so that the GP can realize what a tool he's being? Never mind, you want him to be right. So, now that's two of you who aren't racists, while everyone else is. You are so wise, and so superior, compared to all of us unresolved racists out here.

I'm as white as they come and Google Photos has tagged several monkeys in my pictures as me. Nobody is writing news stories about that (as well they shouldn't!), but because this guy is black the world ended ?

That's a quite incredible coincidence! Google's face identification uses things like the distance between your eyes, nose and mouth position etc to tell you apart from other people. It works very well.

So for it to misidentify monkeys as you, somehow it must be measuring the monkey's face as very close to your own.

The issue in TFA is different though. It's not identifying a specific person, just confusing humans and monkeys in general.

But that is the point though isn't. It's not a newsworthy story. And even it did deserve a mention, it certainly didn't warrant the outrage displayed. Most of that is because the guy was black, which I'm pretty sure is also just racism.

You do not have the right not to be offended. Generally I shouldn't go out of my way to do something just to offend you but that's not even close to the case here. I seriously doubt many people were offended. I do however think a certain group of people used this as an opportunity to criticize google. This group of people care less about difficulties black people face than they do care about being seen about caring about black issues. There is a reason SJW is a derogatory term.

There are so many actual issues that black or native North Americans face where the solutions are actually hindered by SJWs. It is quite frustrating.

>There are so many actual issues that black or native North Americans face

When I was a kid, dark-skinned people didn't show up well in photos... primarily because white people chose the film chemistry to make the faces they were familiar with (pale ones!) look good in pictures.

I think THAT was probably deserving of some indignant complaining. THIS is a quick laugh and a "Well, let's try and figure out how to make the algorithm better". Anything more tells you a lot more about the person complaining tha

Anyway, I don't think anyone is really offended here, just frustrated that they can't solve this engineering challenge.

There are many engineering challenges left in image recognition. The difference is that the AI recognizing a table correctly as a table in 99.99% of the cases gets praise as a very accurate system, but when it defines 99.99% of black people as black people, and 0.01% as gorillas, then they will get offended and demand an immediate fix.

If it was 0.01% then no one would care. Unfortunately it's actually kinda common. Web cams with face tracking that can't see black people, standard auto settings on cameras not handling black skin well... There was a great example on Twitter of a hand dryer with optical hand detection that couldn't see black skin.

Anyway, I don't think anyone is really offended here, just frustrated that they can't solve this engineering challenge.

Have you read the thread? There are a lot of people here who are INCREDIBLY offended that google's engineers are actually taking responsiblity for their code rather than just saying "it's an algorithm" and letting it continue.

I think, fundamentally, what they can't stand is the idea that people might be responsible for what they do.

Black people look more like gorillas than average in the same way white people look more like white bird poop than average. There are 'bad' things black people will look more like than other groups and there are 'good' things they'll look more like than other groups. All this algorithm did was uncover this relationship in its rough state. As it is refined it will uncover relationships more and more toward what is intended.

Why do people always come to such idiotic scenarios?How the funk should a car that has its speed adapted to the conditions, come into a situation where it has to chose to hit one group of pedestrians? Pedestrians walking directly on the road? Directly behind a curve in a wood?The car will break, that is all, it wont turn away from 5 people in front of it to hit one to the left or one to the right. And you can damn be assured, it does not even check if what is in front of it is a human, an other obstacle or

A human who steps out within 60 feet of a car going 40MPH that has no alternate path available to it will get hit, brakes or no brakes. There will come situations where any alternate paths will also have humans. Self driving cars will sometimes be killing humans, that is a certainty.

The car will break, that is all, it wont turn away from 5 people in front of it to hit one to the left or one to the right. And you can damn be assured, it does not even check if what is in front of it is a human, an other obstacle or two cows. It sees an obstacle and breaks, thats it.

What good is a car that needs to be fixed whenever it encounters an obstacle?

About 20 years ago, jewwatch was in the top 3 listings when searching for jews on yahoo search, due to the way that links were created. Too many people got upset, so things were patched to prevent this, by adding code to explicitly prevent this.

1) IQ tests are extremely culturally biased. There may be average intelligence differences you could correlate with skin colour, but none we can currently measure, and certainly none significant enough to use to prejudge individual ability.

2) Koko is a fraud that has been debunked several times. Koko is amazing, but nowhere near the level of amazing that the involved researchers proclaim.

Well, when we have a universally agreed definition of what "intelligence" is, and have shown how it can be accurately and usefully quantified as a single number (a rather extraordinary claim in itself), then maybe someone could start to design an unbiassed test for it. Wake me up when that happens. The HHGTTG joke about the ultimate answer being 42 had it right: there's no point looking for an answer until you have properly defined and understood the question.

I mean, the person at Google who thought "lets automatically, and without consent, tag the public's photos with names as identified by an untested algorithm without any checks on identifying people as animals, celebrities, famous criminals, other people's partners etc. - what could possibly go wrong?" probably aced a shitload of intelligence tests.

The error is to think that IQ tests only test native abilities. In a large part, IQ tests are about learned skills. Learned skills are culturally (or probably more accurately environmentally) biased. Look at the kind of abstract problems presented in an IQ test - it is quite easy to train about solving them. Does the few days (or even the few months) you spend on training on these tests make you more intelligent ? No, but you'll score higher. Likewise, the education you receive and the environment you are e

They miscategorize a lot of things, that is not what caused the erasure of the category. The truth of AI categorization is only that an algorithm assigned that category, not that the category corresponds to reality.

The agenda is that society can only be told selective truths. Feefees of vulnerable classes can't be hurt and bigotry must not be given arguments, not even if those arguments are false. The truth must suffer for this agenda.

Feefees of vulnerable classes can't be hurt and bigotry must not be given arguments, not even if those arguments are false. The truth must suffer for this agenda.

Not sure what a "feefee" is, but if the "arguments are false" then how can the truth suffer? It sounds like you are reciting (badly) something you read without understanding it. The truth is suffering, but not from vulnerable classes.

Just because the truth can be used in a false argument, doesn't mean that is all the truth is good for.

Knowing when their algorithm fails will be valuable knowledge to many, not knowledge Google would be necessarily interested in handing out, but still valuable. In this case it's a truth solely hidden because it feels offensive.

Gorilla is offensive for the same reason other terms used derogatorily are. It was frequently used as a term of offense during the slave trade and jim crow. There are references going back to the 1600's when the slave trade started referring to humans with dark skin as gorilla's or apes.

But go ahead and think it's not a big deal because you're an idiot, you'd think differently if someone had used the term to refer to you as sub-human.

While Gorilla has been used as offensive term for blacks, you shouldn't make up facts. Just stick to the truth - it's bad enough as it is.

Gorillas weren't even known in the Western world until 1847. There's only a 14-year overlap with American Slavery (trans-atlantic slave trade having been abolished almost a half century before the discovery), and it's not like the American South was tapped into the latest ecology news out of Africa.

A relative gave us some old cartoons when my daughters were younger. My wife said she was watching a "Betty Boop" cartoon and couldn't figure out why there was a gorilla in the audience, until it started to spit watermelon and she realized it was a derogatory caricature. We removed those from our cartoon lineup.

I know some of the early Tom and Jerry cartoons I saw as a kid had similarly insensitive inclusions. It's actually pretty shocking to run across these sorts of things. It's easy to forgot how hurtfu

That don't apply anymore? Don't be a fucking idiot. Gorilla is a term as frequently used as any other racial slur. It's used just as often today as all the other terms as it was when it first started to be used.

You didn't get the memo. There are no more hard problems. The science is settled. In 2018, how could you think otherwise? Any output you don't like is evidence of racism. Appreciation for complexity gets you nowhere when you're on a mission from God.